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NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned last week that Russia’s military investments and planning suggest it may launch a full-scale attack on European members of the alliance within five years. He observed that “allied defense spending and production must rise rapidly, our armed forces must have what they need to keep us safe.”
Rutte is correct. Unfortunately, only some of NATO’s 32 allies recognize this reality.
True, with the exception of Hungary and Slovakia, all NATO allies understandably lament President Donald Trump’s strategy toward Russia. They recognize that it undermines trans-Atlantic security and the cause of freedom in the utterly delusional belief that Russian President Vladimir Putin seeks peaceful cooperation rather than vicious ideological competition. Indeed, European concerns notwithstanding, Americans should also lament that strategy for its plain disservice to U.S. economic, political, and security interests.
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But the good NATO allies also recognize the U.S. military’s need to deter China’s booming military power and increasing aggression. In turn, they are finally stepping up to bolster NATO’s defensive posture against Putin’s prospective aggression. His Russia strategy aside, Trump deserves credit for getting us to this point. After all, three years of the largest land war in Europe since World War II didn’t bring the Europeans to reality. Only Trump’s return to office did that.
Even then, there is a big difference between what different NATO allies are actually doing.
Poland stands out on the positive side of the ledger. Warsaw dramatically increased defense spending in response to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Poland will allocate 4.7% of its GDP to defense in 2025, increasing to 4.8% in 2026. This is far higher than even the new NATO target of 3.5% of GDP for defense spending, with an additional 1.5% of GDP allocated for other security-related expenditures. Poland’s GDP allocation to defense spending significantly exceeds the United States’s 3% of GDP expenditure in 2025, and perhaps 3.3% for 2026.
The strongly pro-American Baltic state allies are also increasing their defense outlays. Estonia and Lithuania will spend more than 5% of GDP on defense in 2026, with Latvia spending 4.9% of GDP on its military. Europe’s largest economy and most powerful political actor, Germany, is also finally getting serious about Putin’s threat.
It’s a long-overdue development.
The Western media fawned over former Chancellor Angela Merkel for her pro-immigration policies. But the media ignored her utter neglect of defense spending and her reflexive appeasement of both Putin and of Chinese President Xi Jinping. Merkel’s successor, Olaf Scholz, was similarly pathetic, offering only dithering weakness in response to the invasion of Ukraine. Thankfully, incumbent Chancellor Frederich Merz is taking a very different approach.
Germany’s defense budget is expected to increase to 2.8% of GDP in 2026, benefiting from a significant allocation pushed through by Merz. Germany is expected to spend 3% of its GDP on defense in 2027, rising to NATO’s target of 3.5% of GDP by 2029. Where previous German governments made excuses about not being able to invest more in defense, more quickly, Merz acts.
These investments are not for show. Unlike those allies using creative budget games to increase defense spending, Poland, Germany, and the Baltics are investing in the hard power that matters. Deploying capabilities such as bolstered air defenses, intelligence and targeting systems, air power, and armored maneuver forces, they are moving to counter Russia’s future military threat to the alliance. These allies are also demonstrating to America that they are willing to bear heavier burdens in its support.
Sadly, the same cannot be said for all American NATO allies.
Under Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Hungary is a colony of communist China and a political prostitute for Russia. Orban treats Trump as a useful idiot and has no business being in NATO. Slovakia, under Prime Minister Robert Fico, is very similar. Under the imperialist Islamism of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey is another problematic ally, although at least willing to engage in beneficial NATO cooperation at the military-to-military level.
But when it comes to defense spending, it’s also clear that even America’s closest allies aren’t taking Russia seriously.
Consider America’s closest ally, the United Kingdom. The U.K. remains America’s key partner due to the close personal and professional cooperation between the militaries and intelligence services of the two countries. But under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the U.K. has been totally unwilling to match Merz’s boldness. Starmer might be presiding over the biggest tax-and-spend splurge for decades, but he aims to spend just 2.6% of GDP on defense by April 2027. Efforts to reach 3% of GDP defense spending will be left to the next Parliament in 2029.
This is deeply unserious leadership. In practical terms, it means that the U.S. Army’s closest foreign partner, the British Army, will continue being a force of potent but limited combat capacity. It means that the U.K. navy will remain too small and munition stocks too shallow to effectively contest surging Russian activity in the Arctic and Atlantic.
This mismatch between U.K. rhetoric and action is striking. Only this week did the U.K. military’s top officer warn that Russia’s threat demanded “a whole-of-society response” and that “more families will know what sacrifice for our nation means.” The chief of Britain’s CIA equivalent human intelligence service similarly warned that Russia is “testing [the U.K.] in the grey zone with tactics that are just below the threshold of war.” That warning reflects Russia’s recent record of assassination plots, sabotage against civilian rail lines in Poland, arson against warehouses in the U.K. and an Ikea store in Lithuania, and even bomb plots targeting cargo flights to the U.S.
To be clear, these actions reflect Putin’s profound animus toward NATO and America, and Trump’s grave delusion in believing that the former KGB lieutenant colonel can be made into an American partner. But the basic operational point is that Russia’s covert action threat today and its military threat tomorrow both require Merz-style hard budget choices rather than Merkel-style rhetoric. Starmer is failing that test.
Similarly, so is the European Union’s second-largest economy, France. While President Emmanuel Macron is talking tough on Russia, his actions, comme d’hab, do not match his rhetoric.
French defense spending is expected to hover just above 2% of GDP in 2026 and 2027, with a real movement toward the 3.5% NATO target only a distant possibility. This is a big problem. While France faces major budgetary pressures, Macron’s observant rhetoric as to the profound threat posed by Russia should be reflected in German-style defense investments. Or at least something like them.
That said, if the U.K. and France remain problematic in terms of defense spending, when it comes to the third- and fourth-largest economies in Europe, the situation is catastrophic. Spain has announced that it will allocate just 2.1% of GDP to spending and then cease efforts to increase spending. Absurdly, NATO appears to have approved this abject rejection of alliance responsibilities. And while Italy says it will spend 2% of GDP on defense by 2028, most analysts believe it will only be able to do so by relying on budgetary gimmicks. The U.S. should reject this free-loading by relocating its military bases to Spanish and Italian soil. Budget increases by the Netherlands, Belgium, and even bordering Finland are also insufficient in scale and speed.
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The lesson, then, is clear.
Those closest to Russia are preparing for war, and those further away are focusing on deterrence through that favorite of contemporary European strategies: lofty rhetoric unbound from action. The U.S. should thus refocus on bolstering cooperation with those allies that are showing their seriousness about history’s greatest alliance.
